Poch Digs In

It's October, and you know what that means.

Falling leaves. Pumpkin spiced everything. My birthday.

And a FIFA date featuring US men's national team games against Ecuador and Australia.

It's questionable what we'll learn from the 180 minutes of soccer the American men will play in friendlies in Texas and Colorado. Friendlies are terrible gauges of where a team stands even in the best of times, for a host of reasons I don't need to list here. We'll overreact to whatever results come, but that doesn't mean they'll be particularly informative.

What is informative is the roster that Pochettino picked for this window, allowing for a few notable injuries. The USMNT boss clearly stated that September was the last time he'd be looking at new players ahead of the real work to prepare for the World Cup; hence names like Tristan Blackmon and Sean Zawadzki making the cut last month.

A few thoughts on selections:

• Tyler Adams was excused because of the impending birth of his second child. That opens a door for guys like Aidan Morris, Tanner Tessman, and James Sands, all of whom deserve a look on club form. With Johnny Cardoso injured, I'm curious which of that trio is going to get significant enough playing time to give us data to take into 2026.
• Sands can play in a couple of spots, including as a centerback in a back three. Does that suggest Pochettino is planning on deploying that system in this camp and with greater frequency moving forward?
• I still don't like our forward situation. Josh Sargent has yo-yo'd out again after an anemic September window and Agyemang is incredibly flawed (but also inherently root-for-able). Pepi is hurt and so Balogun is the man. Another goal or two against good South American competition and a Socceroos low block would go a long way towards improving my confidence in him.
• I don't see it with Cameron Carter-Vickers, but he's another guy who plays in a back three and there aren't any obvious centerback call-ups after Reams and Richards.
• Dest being hurt stinks and the US is better with him on the field, but I'm starting to think Alex Freeman is going to be a major part of the World Cup campaign next summer.
• Bums me out to see Yunus Musah left off, though I understand it. With the playing time he's getting at Atalanta, missing out on this camp is probably more of a small setback than an indication Pochettino doesn't rate him for 2026.
• My best guess is that Joe Scally just doesn't do the things going forward that Pochettino wants from his fullbacks. And if we're talking about playing a back three, Scally isn't a fit. Or maybe it's the golf cart donut thing.

Beyond the selections, what struck me most about Thursday's roster drop was some of the things Pochettino said about his approach to communication with players.

If you missed it, here's one bit from a six-minute monologue Pochettino gave in response to a question from The Athletic's Henry Bushnell about why Pochettino doesn't communicate with players who are or not called up.

“In our philosophy, players don’t need to know,” Pochettino said, launching into a six-minute monologue. “If a player needs to know, it’s because they don’t really feel the sport in the way that I feel it. Because you really know when you play why you play; and when you don’t play, you also deep down know why. The rest is …” and here he waffled, saying he preferred not to use a term he used last window (“bullshit”), while also offering no alternative.

“The player wants you to justify; they want to know the evidence,” he continued. “If you explain, you are going to make the player happy. The players, they need to know. The players that were not called today, they need to be desperate to perform better [for] their clubs.”

That's as transcribed by Leander Schaerlaekens in his piece on the roster at The Guardian.

“It’s not because your name is one [thing] or another, you’re going to have a place for sure on the roster for the World Cup,” said Pochettino on Thursday. “That’s an idea that we were fighting in the last year to try to fix. To change the culture. To change the idea of, ‘OK, because in the past I perform in some way, or because I did well four years ago, now I am ready to come and to use my place because that is my place.’ I think that has changed a lot.

“It’s an open system,” Pochettino added. “They need to convince us to come again. They need to come here and to perform, to follow the rules, to behave in the way that we want [them to] behave, and try not only to win the games but to think and to build something important.”

Nothing here is revolutionary. Pochettino isn't reinventing how an international manager handles the selection process. This is how most national teams work. It's how selection for Argentina, Brazil, France, England, and Spain works. The coach picks the group of players he believes gives the team the best chance to win the games in any given window and that's that. No faffing about with "relationships" or bruised egos. As Pochettino says, if you don't make the team there's a reason.

Maybe you understand, maybe you don't. But it's not the job of the coach to massage the feelings of players who don't make the cut. No one's spot is guaranteed and it's important to send that message.

I don't know if this makes the team better—and I think it's possible that different groups need different approaches in different moments. Maybe the mostly youthful charges Gregg Berhalter took to Qatar needed the approach Berhalter took to the job. More of the brotherhood stuff. More kumbaya.

Still, I'm excited to see what this means for culture of the national team moving forward. Accountability matters. There's talent in this group and Pochettino has more work to do to prove to me he can get the most out of it, but this window is intriguing as a step in that process.

We didn't get to do a roster-response episode of The Best Soccer Show, but we did do a show on Tuesday with a discussion about Christian Pulisic's hot start in Italy. Have a listen.

Morning Kickaround this week hit on some big topics and covered new soccer efforts in a number of places. Watch and subscribe.